Brainfire Read online

  “You’re stoned, my sweet.”

  “Well of course I’m bloody stoned.”

  Wellington propped himself up with a pillow. Sally, burying her face in the sheets, couldn’t stop laughing.

  “I say, was that chap Rayner put out the other day?”

  “Put out? You make him sound like a cat, Markie.”

  “Oh. You know what I mean.”

  “I disappointed him,” Sally said. “I hurt him, I think.”

  Wellington sighed. “These things happen, after all.”

  The author rose, rings of spare flesh falling around him, and went across the room to the table, where he poured two glasses of wine from a decanter. Sally watched him outlined against the glass door that led to the living room. A faint yellow lamp burned; he looked monstrous in silhouette, like a whale. He came back across the floor.

  Sally took one of the glasses unsteadily. A little wine slicked down her chin to her breasts. “Oooh, it’s so cold,” she said.

  “I’ll lick it off,” Wellington said, and proceeded to do just that.

  She watched his head bent over her breasts, feeling his damp tongue against her nipples. Beyond the glass door, a shadow moved. For a moment she couldn’t make a connection; ridiculous thoughts rushed through her head—mainly, that Rayner was out there spying on her. She pushed Wellington away from her.

  “Is something wrong?”

  The adjoining door opened. Somebody stood there.

  “You didn’t say anything about a ménage à trots, Markie,” she said. “I agree in principle, but I like a little forewarning.”

  Mark Wellington, surprised, turned to the glass door. The figure was dark, shadowy.

  “I say,” Wellington remarked.

  Sally pulled the bedsheets up over her breasts. She saw Wellington step toward the door and then, in a frightful moment, his huge shape was blown backward across the bed. Sally let the joint slip from her fingers and tried to rise. She experienced a searing pain in her ribs, a searing, spreading pain that caused her to twist to one side, as if she might find relief in this position—

  The figure moved again. Sally slipped from the bed to the floor, an unpleasant rush, a turbulent sensation of darkness moving in on her irrevocably.

  10.

  It was a blustery afternoon; an uneven wind, forever shifting direction, swirled around Wembley Stadium. The crowd was low, about fifty thousand people with an inbred suspicion of the weather. Dubbs, panting up the terracing steps, followed by Rayner, clutched the ticket stubs in his hand. When they reached the top, seeing the expanse of the terracings below them, the grass seemed an impossible green, the markings on the pitch a brilliant white. Rayner realized that he was expected to stand throughout the game, a fact that struck him as curious. He followed Dubbs down through the throng to a position near the front.

  “The only way to understand this odd ritual is to stand for the entire ninety minutes,” Dubbs said. “If you take a seat in the place paradoxically known as the stands, I have the feeling that you lose touch somehow. Self-imposed isolation.”

  They leaned against a crush barrier. Dubbs said, “It could be, of course, that the Russians intend to play a psychic game. One never knows. Perhaps they practice mind rather than ball control.”

  Rayner looked across the crowds. There were yellow flags waving; the lion rampant on a yellow background. An odd sort of chant had begun to echo around the huge stadium bowl. Eng-land. Eng-land. It grew deafeningly, then died, only to grow louder than ever before. It had been Dubbs’s idea to come to the game, attracted by the mystery of the dead parapsychologist. But what did he expect to find? Evidence of telepathic communication among the Soviet players? Rayner felt decidedly claustrophobic in this crush. Dubbs, he noticed, wore a black-and-white rosette in his lapel.

  “I didn’t know you were an aficionado of the game,” Rayner said.

  “Normally, no. But the circumstances are somewhat peculiar. And I may as well exercise a little patriotism while we’re here.” The little man craned his neck forward, staring across the empty field. Two men in overcoats strolled across the grass. They appeared, at least to Rayner, to be looking for potholes.

  Dubbs watched them go out of sight. “A parapsychologist,” he said. “Why go to all the trouble to bring a man like that into England only to kill him as he intends to defect? Trifling puzzles bother me, my dear.”

  Rayner leaned forward, catching bits and pieces of conversation from all sides. “I reckon it a bleedin’ cakewalk.” “Yeah, except for this Kazemayov bloke.” “We ain’t got nuffin’ like the forward penetration we need, this fackin’ defense is like a bleedin’ brick wall.” It was incomprehensible—yet he felt something of the growing tension around him. He watched Dubbs now, who was still trying to peer down toward the field as if he might catch something of interest. But what exactly? A floating piece of ectoplasm? Rayner had never given much credence to parapsychology, perceiving it in terms of card tricks, guesses, coincidences. But Dubbs was behaving as if something unusual was about to take place—

  Suddenly there was an enormous roar. Below, Rayner saw a group of white-shirted players come running onto the field. The English team, he thought. How else could that roar be explained? He realized that in all the time he had spent in London, he had never before felt quite so foreign.

  Now the Soviet team appeared. The silence that greeted them was enormous. In red shirts and white shorts, they lined up in the center of the field and bowed first in one direction, then in another.

  Dubbs nudged him. “They tell me that this Kazemayov chap is the one to watch,” Dubbs said.

  “Which one is he?”

  “He wears the number nine. See him?”

  Rayner looked, but the referee was already calling the captains to the center of the field. A coin was tossed, and for some reason the crowd roared again.

  The man who stood next to Rayner, a toothless figure in a checkered cap, appeared beside himself with excitement even before the game had begun. “Here, you a Yank?” he asked.

  Rayner nodded. He felt his hand being shaken vigorously.

  “Bet you’d like to see the Russians hammered, eh?” The man poked his elbow into Rayner’s ribs. “Bet you’d like to see them fuckers demolished, eh?”

  Politely Rayner nodded. The man took off his cap, wiped sweat from his forehead, then screamed a sequence of abuse at the referee, who, so far as Rayner could tell, had done nothing except blow his whistle for the game to begin. The ball was kicked upfield, hanging in the wind. The Soviet goalkeeper came out and gathered it up safely. When he kicked it back downfield, the wind carried it directly into the English goal area. A scramble took place, a shifting mixture of red and white shirts.

  “Fuckin’ hell, look at this, look at this shambles,” the man was saying. “You’ll see them bastards get a goal before the game’s hardly even started. Watch it. Mark my words.”

  The ball had broken free and Kazemayov, shuffling forward deceptively, went around an English defender. Rayner could not see how it had happened, but the Soviet player was clearing a path toward the English goal, avoiding a series of wild tackles. The goalkeeper, a blur of yellow, came forward and plunged at Kazemayov’s feet—and somehow the ball went bouncing off his arms toward an English player. The noise was deafening: it was like the opening of one massive mouth. Even Dubbs, standing on tiptoe, was excited.

  “Fuckin’ lucky,” the man said. “They nearly put it away then.”

  But now an English counterattack had begun. The ball was moved from one side of the field to the other, passing accurately among players. The Russians fell back into a defensive pattern.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” said the man, taking off his cap again. His face was covered in perspiration, despite the wind that made ball control almost impossible. “C’mon, Woodsy, you fucker—do something! Fuckin’ do something!”

  Woodsy, who was clearly an English attacker, had stopped on the edge of the penalty area, where he was faced b
y a mass of red shirts that blocked his way to the Russian goal. The crowd screamed for Woodsy to move the ball—“pass the bleedin’ fing, pass it, you blind fackin’ arsehole”—and the Englishman, slipping on the greasy turf, tumbling like a clown, lost his balance and the ball was kicked back down toward the center line. Even Dubbs, waving his arms comically, was shouting now.

  “Bloody Woodsy,” said the man in the checkered cap. He took a bottle of light ale from his pocket and opened it, offering it to Rayner. “That bloody Woodsy—he don’t know his arse from a hole in the ground.”

  Rayner sipped some of the ale, which was warm and almost flat, then passed the bottle back. The action had become concentrated in midfield in a series of untidy skirmishes, players colliding with players, the ball rising and falling on the wind.

  Dubbs, turning, said, “Whatever our old friend Andreyev was supposed to do with this team, he obviously didn’t manage to improve their reading of a game. I haven’t seen so many misdirected passes for ages.”

  Below, the referee was blowing up for an infringement that the crowd didn’t like. A free kick was awarded to the Soviets a few feet from the English eighteen-yard line. White-shirted defenders formed a wall as the Russians moved into some prearranged pattern of play. The free kick was taken, lofted over the defenders, and Kazemayov—flashing, hair blown, arms held wide for balance—rose up, entangled with the leaping English goalkeeper, and somehow managed to glide the ball with his forehead into the back of the net.

  “Fuck me,” said the man in the checkered cap. “You see that? Did you bloody see that? Pushed the fuckin’ goalie clear as a bloody bell.”

  The jubilant Soviets crowded around Kazemayov, who raised his arms upward in triumph. The man beside Rayner took off his cap and scratched his head. He was shaking his face from side to side with disbelief. Rayner mumbled something sympathetic, noticing that Dubbs—even Ernest Dubbs—looked dispirited.

  At half time, the score remained 1–0 for the Soviets. The players ran off the field toward the dressing rooms. The man in the checkered cap drifted away.

  Dubbs blew his nose with an outsize handkerchief and surveyed the empty field. “What you see before you, my dear, is the culmination of English culture. Wordsworth, Constable, Pope, Milton—the very essence is distilled in a game of football. Have you seen enough?”

  There was a touch of rain buried in the wind now. Rayner looked up at the gray sky. “You want to leave?”

  Dubbs shrugged. “Might as well. I doubt that we’re going to find any explanation of friend Andreyev by hanging around here. Besides, it’s a poor game. The second half will be one long struggle by the English forwards against a team that has absolutely no desire to adventure out of their own half of the field. Let’s go.”

  Following the little man, Rayner began to climb the steps to the top of the terracing. Dubbs moved quickly, pushing his way through. Here and there groups of men drank from metal flasks or balanced cardboard cups of hot Bovril. There was martial music, shredded by the wind, coming across the loudspeaker system. At the top, Dubbs stopped. He turned to make sure Rayner was immediately behind him, then continued down the stairways that led to the exit. Crowds milled around the entrances to toilets; mounted policemen sat on gigantic brown horses; brigades of officials from the St. John’s ambulance service stood beside piles of empty stretchers. It was all odd somehow, Rayner thought: the whole ritual that, played out in a vast bowl, had something almost gladiatorial about it.

  Halfway down the steps, Dubbs paused. For a moment, Rayner thought the little man had suffered a heart attack or that some savage twist of indigestion had caused him to double over, hands pressed to his midriff, moaning. Rayner reached down and caught him as he began to fall. Slippery, a sense of wetness, his own hands covered with blood, an awareness of the crowd roaring in the stadium as the teams ran out once more to resume play—these impressions surged against Rayner as he tried to keep Dubbs from slipping, as he held him against himself, forced him to sit with his back to an iron rail. And then he understood, with a comprehension that was distant from him, with a recognition that blinded him, that Dubbs had been shot.

  He opened Dubbs’s shirt collar. The little man’s eyes were blank. Through the crowd now a mounted policeman was forcing his horse.

  “Dubbs. Dubbs.”

  Dubbs opened his mouth a little way. “A rough sport, John. I’ve always thought it a rough sport.”

  “Dubbs, keep your eyes open, don’t move—” Rayner shouted toward the mounted policeman, aware too of several men running with stretchers through the crowd.

  Dubbs smiled. “Damn funny how there’s no pain, my dear. I always imagined it would be terribly sore, but …”

  “Please, Dubbs. Please don’t speak.” Rayner felt a horrible panic: it was as if he were hauling someone out of a rough sea with a rope frayed to breaking point. “Don’t say another thing, please.”

  “Twice,” Dubbs said. “I felt the damn thing twice.”

  Transfixed, Rayner stared at the blood soaking through the dark overcoat, at the streaks running across the astrakhan collar.

  “Two shots,” Dubbs said. “And the funny feeling I have, John, is that the second one … wasn’t … meant for me.”

  Rayner watched the ambulance men come up the steps with a stretcher. He looked up. The wind, the flags flapping, furling, unfurling, as if what they signaled were a coronation of death. He clenched his hands so tight that the nails brought blood to the palms.

  The ambulance men raised Dubbs, with strange gentleness, onto the canvas stretcher. One, skinny and bespectacled, with a face Rayner realized he would never forget as long as he lived, said, “You know this fellow, sir?”

  Rayner tried to speak. Shock. What did shock do to you? Numbness. A weird indifference. The defensive system of the emotions. He nodded his head vacantly.

  The ambulance man said, “It doesn’t look good, sir. It doesn’t look good at all.”

  11.

  Sometimes, Rayner thought, there is a perversity in nature that maliciously fails to take into account the feelings of men. Funerals in the sunshine, weddings in the rain, the final parting of lovers in a heat wave, babies born in blizzards. It was as if whoever had been the architect of the system had built into it a magnificent indifference. This Sunday, for one thing—the sweet sense of spring in Grosvenor Square, the warmth in the breezes that rushed across Hyde Park and flowed through the narrow streets of Mayfair. A beautiful morning: if you weren’t dead. If you weren’t in that place where Ernest Dubbs was. If you were alive and breathing and holding your own against whatever forces, natural or otherwise, conspired against you. He could not believe in Ernest Dubbs’s death. A magician might have fabricated a rabbit or an eagle out of thin air and claimed the act as a direct result of spiritual materialization, and he would have believed in that before giving credence to the little man’s death. It was more than a sense of absence, of some hollow in experience: it was the feeling he entertained that Dubbs was not dead—that he was alive somewhere, standing in his favorite bar, drinking his Scotch, smoking one of his ridiculous cigarettes. Explain it to me, Rayner thought. Explain it to me, somebody.

  The second one wasn’t meant for me …

  He went up the Embassy steps. The Marine guard, unaccustomed to Sunday duty, fresh from some impossible place like Des Moines, smiled; a gesture Rayner didn’t return. He rode in the elevator, newspaper tucked under his arm, and went directly to his office. Inside, he closed the door, crossed the room, threw The Sunday Telegraph down on his desk. Why had he come here anyhow? Hour after hour he had spent at the hospital in Wembley. Transfusion followed transfusion; but all the plasma in the world wouldn’t have restored Dubbs.

  Two shots. Two direct hits. One had passed through a lung. The other had blown a kidney away. The second one wasn’t meant for me … Rayner sat down, tired, his eyes shut. He had waited for the announcement of death, then had gone to his flat in St. John’s Wood and slept, a deep sleep, dr
eamlessly still on an ocean floor. He opened out the newspaper. The dark newsprint angered him. Even the feel of the paper. They reminded him of the continuum of things, of how little a life mattered, how little even a death mattered; there was news to print, there was a world running on like some fucking great machine. But not for Ernest Dubbs. There wasn’t even a mention of the little man by name—the bizarre protocol of security. Boxed, a couple of sentences, a couple of flat phrases: “An unidentified man was shot yesterday during the football game between the Soviet Union and England at Wembley. His assailant is unknown. The identity of the man is being kept secret until close relatives are informed.”

  Like Dubbs himself, the story would die there. Period. No more. Who fucking cared? Rayner gazed at the paper … “man was shot yesterday …” On the bottom line of the story, an added extra, there was the phrase: “The game ended in a 2–2 draw (for a full match report turn to page 24).” Rayner slung the paper down and got up and turned to the window. What did it come down to? Somebody meant to kill both Dubbs and him, the common denominator being Victor Andreyev. Victor Fucking Andreyev. I should count my lucky stars, he thought. A poor marksman: he could pick off only one of us. Back to target practice, motherfucker.

  … being kept secret—

  Somebody buries the story. Somebody buries Dubbs.

  He watched the gorgeous sun aflame on a redbrick building. Then he turned back to the paper, idly turning pages. You keep running into questions, he thought. Never the sight of a plain old answer. Richard Rayner. Andreyev. Dubbs. Were they parts of some illogical whole? Or simply splinters? Take any old kaleidoscope and give it a shake and you never get the same pattern twice. It was easy when you were innocent and unsullied—two plus two always came out the same. But not now, not in a world in which mathematics and death were conjoined in a terrible mismatch.